A few years ago we attended a Potato Day event at Sydenham Girls School (post here) and it was great. It had a mix and match seed potato sale, bulbs, fruit canes and even a seed swap. It was only a few quid to get in and the spuds weren’t too badly priced either.

We’re not sure about the admission price or if there is a seed swap at the Roots & Shoots event but we’ll put the feelers out. It’s a great venue, as a few years ago we attended an Introduction to Beekeeping course there. After a while when we were there we forgot we were actually in London. Do pencil it in the diary…

A massive season’s greetings to all from Weeds up to me knees and may 2017 bring less slugs, less diseases in the garden, a better veg and flower crop and more decent music!

Talking of which, if you’re looking for a dub-wise christmas soundtrack here’s a couple of radio shows worth checking out. The first is from our good friends Dr Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss who present The Echo Chamber on KFAI. Their festive 21st December show is here.

The second is Terry C out of Chicago’s Echo Beach as mentioned in our last post. Here’s the Echo Beach 10th Anniversary & Happy Holidub Special from the 23rd December.

Big shout to The TurntableTerrorist Terry C out of Chicago for sending us this pic of his garden from a few years ago. As he emailed this evening “I especially long for it now that we’re in deep winter in Chicago.” We know what you mean, even though the snow and the frost aren’t showing their faces in the UK at the moment but they will.

Check out Terry’s excellent show “Echo Beach” that is a big 10 years old this year on WLUW 88.7 Chicago live here and on the Mixcloud site here.

As it’s says on the WLUW website it’s a “bass-heavy sonic journey through the world of dub, starting with old-school roots and covering dub and dub influenced music including new-school roots, ambient dub, dubhop, dubstep, digi-dub, Asian dub and more from around the globe. Rivers of bass flowing into oceans of dub…all from the shores of Lake Michigan.” A show well up our street and definitely one to tune in to. Cheers to Terry C for playing our tunes on his show. Appreciated!

And while we’re here, here’s a lovely bit of chilled out vibes to celebrate the winter solstice (it’s all uphill from here) as heard on the Rt Hon David Rodigan show this week. Tune!!!

Big shout to our musical collaborator Jazz’min Tutum (Dub Poetess, DJ and host of the Dub Kali Roots radio show and vocalist of the great Zion Train) for this latest instalment of the Jazz’min & Madtone musical adventure.Also a massive thanks to Steve Barker, Fenny and Jim from the excellent On The Wire on BBC Radio Lancashire for playing it on their 3rd December show here and to the dread gardener and DJ, Don Letts (above – a shot of his garden featured a few years ago in weedshere) for doing likewise on his 13th November Culture Clash show here. Excellent stuff, we here at Weeds salute you!

We had to do a bit of speed gardening today (at the pace a council worker would go at if their foreman had said “as soon as you’re finished you can go home”) as we’d left it a bit late in the afternoon when we started. There were good intentions to begin earlier but you know how it is on a Sunday.In the space of an hour, a couple of beds were dug over, some plants moved, lost root veg rescued and the Lemon Verbena hopefully protected for the winter. There’s still a good few beds to crack on with but at least we’ve started. The more you get out of the way now the less work it is in the spring. It’s just making that start!

The sun was out today so went out and pulled up a couple of weather-bashed dahlias. The foliage on the plants have now turned black after the frosts so it’s time to bring the tubers in for the winter.

It’s a simple process, you leave on few inches of the stalk at the top, knock off as much as soil as possible on the tuber (and carefully remove any damaged parts), leave to dry off for a week or two and then keep in a frost free place (under the stairs is good.) Keep a check of them over winter and come next year they’ll be ready to go out again. If you leave them in the ground (which you can if you want to risk it) there’s a good chance they’ll turn to mush! More on lifting Dahlias here.

And this week’s dahlia of the week is the brilliantly named bed head (below). I’ve just seen on the web too the statement “don’t write off dahlias as your granny’s flower” and with varieties called “Poppers”, “Blah, Blah, Blah” and “Rave Machine” they certainly are not!

I also checked the compost heap I hadn’t touched for a good year and it’s looking great. That lot won’t be sitting in that bin for long! Don’t look too closely in the bin as there’s two elastic bands, a piece of string, a paper clip and a plastic spoon. How did they get in there?